Where Love Goes (40 page)

“Actually,” she says, “I do have some idea of what it’s like to give birth. What I can’t imagine is what it’s like to be a mother who lets the eighth anniversary of her daughter’s birth pass—not to mention a couple hundred days before that—without even a phone call. It’s true I have no idea what it must feel like to be you. But I wonder, do you have any idea what it feels like to be Ursula?”

For a second it almost looks as though Joan might cry, but she clears her throat and fingers her choker instead. “I suppose this museum is governed by a board of trustees?” she says.

Claire nods, barely hearing her. Her heart is still pounding.

“I have to assume this board isn’t aware of your record of child abuse or my daughter’s current charges of sexual misconduct,” Joan says. “Perhaps those are the people I should be speaking with.” She’s gone.

T
he woman’s a nut,” Nancy says. The two of them are sitting in Claire’s kitchen. Nancy has fixed them a pot of tea from the bag of tea leaves Sally has left out. “Jesus, where did you get this stuff?” she says, spitting a mouthful into the sink. “It tastes horrible.”

“Joan may be a nut,” Claire says, “but she’s going to speak to the museum board about me. I could lose my job over this.”

“And you actually think they’ll take this woman seriously?” Nancy says. “Look who we’re dealing with here: a woman who takes up with some guy a couple months after her kid’s born, and has her husband babysit while she’s off making sculptures of pussies and fucking. She lives in New Zealand, for Christ’s sake. She hasn’t seen her kid in two years. Who taught Ursula how to make corn-husk dolls? Who took her to
Snow White
? Where was Mrs. Clitoris then?”

“You know what Vivian’s like,” says Claire. “If she takes it into her head that the board should get rid of me, she’ll terminate my contract tomorrow and bring in some computer expert who’ll put the whole museum on the Internet and replace the teddy bear collection with monitors.”

“Hello?” says Nancy. “Remember who I’m talking to here? Claire Temple, Blue Hills’s answer to Betty Crocker. The only person I know who actually told me with a straight face one time that she thought babies’ dirty diapers smelled good. So long as they were breast-fed, if memory serves me right. Sound familiar?”

“You don’t know everything,” Claire tells her. “You don’t know how people can make you sound if they want to. You say you’re going to cut off your braids and they make you out to be suicidal. You lose your temper and slap your son and you’re a child abuser.”

“Don’t turn yourself into a victim,” says Nancy. “You can’t lose sight of who you are. You may have to fight for that job of yours.”

But Claire has been under siege for so long from so many different directions, she’s no longer sure what’s real. Maybe she really is an unfit mother. Maybe she has done something terrible to Ursula.

Sometimes Claire finds herself looking at Ursula, bent over her coloring book, humming that “Gilligan’s Island” theme song, and she things, Yes, this is good after all. She’s just a little girl, for goodness sake. I’m the grown-up here. I can love this child
.

But then there are times when she’ll hear Ursula pounding at the door, wanting to bake or play in Claire’s dollhouse, or simply wanting, and just the sight of her round, hungry, perpetually disappointed face pressed up against the screen door makes Claire want to run in the opposite direction
.

And something worse, too: Sometimes she looks for Ursula to fail. She wants to show her up in front of her father. “See,” she wants to say to him. “My children are better than yours. I have done a better job of raising them.” She is ashamed and sickened, but sometimes she even thinks she wants Tim to choose her over his daughter. Knowing this, Claire’s not even sure anymore that Joan doesn’t have a point, mounting whatever kind of crusade against Claire she has planned. She used to know as clearly as her own name that if she was nothing else in life, she was a good mother. Now she isn’t even sure what a good mother is. All she knows is her son may be going to live with his father and her daughter says she doesn’t care what her mother does; she’ll be going off to college in a couple years, anyway. What kind of a lunatic is Claire that now she’s going to have another child?

O
nly She isn’t. She wakes to find her nightgown covered with blood and a cramping in her stomach as if there’s a hand wringing her insides out. She heads to the bathroom, bent over like an old woman. She sits down on the toilet, and when she gets up there’s something that looks like a blood clot floating in the water. She reaches her hand down and scoops it up. Nothing much to see: a little filmy tissue, a web of red. Somewhere in there she knows there was the beginnings of what might have become a baby, but what can she do—bury it in the garden, in a box like the one Ursula gave her that time?

She stands there for a moment holding it in her palm. She says a prayer. Then she places it back in the toilet and flushes. The water swirls like the curl of a wave, creating a hollow place in the middle that’s totally still. There’s a sucking noise, and then the water’s still again. It’s gone.

Later she will realize there is a certain horrible comedy to this moment:

“Tell us when it was that you came to understand the meaning of life, Ms. Temple,” the voice asks her. Does it belong to the judge they called the Marital Master back in domestic court perhaps? Is it the voice of Vivian, at a board meeting, or Sergeant Donohue of the Blue Hills Police? Unclear. Only her answer is
.

“Well,” says Claire, “I’d have to say the truth was revealed to me when I was standing over the toilet bowl, watching my two-week-old fetus disappear down into my sewer pipes. Suddenly it was as if the mist lifted from over the water and I saw my life before me.”

It is right at this moment that Claire realizes she will never become Ursula’s stepmother. She will never marry Tim. She knows she will never shed another tear over Mickey or waste another breath complaining to Sam about child support or soccer cleats. Her son may go stay with his father for a month, or three months, or even six, but she knows he’ll be back. Her daughter may be getting her driver’s license, and she has almost certainly been having sex with her boyfriend, but she’s not done needing her mother. She may never have needed her mother more, in fact
.

Claire’s family doesn’t look like the one in her dollhouse (boy in police custody; mother eating lobster naked with her boyfriend, on the verge of losing her job for sexual misconduct charges). But they are a family, all right. They are even, in their twisted, dysfunctional, damaged, beat-up way, a reasonably happy one
.

E
ven though it’s usually Claire who calls Mickey—and in the four days that have passed since the night of Bev’s visit she hasn’t—Claire knew that Mickey was going to call her eventually. This morning he does.

“Okay, Slim,” he says. “Who died?”

“Everybody’s fine here, Mickey,” says Claire. Her voice is flat. She doesn’t reach for coffee this time. He will know from the sound of her that something’s wrong.

“Let’s see,” he says. “I know for a fact I didn’t give you the clap. I’m not taking you to court to win custody of your kids, because I’d rather play for the Chicago Cubs, if you must know the truth. I haven’t told you lately that you always sing almost a half-step flat, and I am not about to tell you
The Bridges of Madison County
was the most moving reading experience I ever had. I give up. What did I do?”

“I don’t really feel like talking to you this morning, Mickey,” she says. “I’m pretty busy. Halloween and all.”

“That bad, huh, Slim?” he says. “Okay. Have it your way. Call me when you feel like it.”

She feels like it many times. But she never does. Ever again. And the interesting thing is, neither does he. It’s over as simply as that.

T
he board of directors of the Blue Hills Children’s Museum has called a special meeting today. Normally Claire would be present for such a meeting, but because the issue at hand is certain allegations made against her by Ursula’s mother, Joan Vine, Vivian has explained that she will have to be excluded from the discussion. “You know we all love you to death,” Vivian told her when she called this morning to explain the situation. “But in an organization of this nature, with people entrusting their children to us, we just can’t be too careful about the type of individual we have on staff. I know I don’t have to explain to you why the least sign of impropriety could open such a can of worms.”

So Claire has the day off, and since it’s Halloween, she has spent the afternoon carving jack-o’-lanterns with Pete and Sally to keep her mind off other things. Like what she will do for money if she loses her job at the museum, for instance. And how she is going to tell Tim she can’t see him anymore.

It’s five o’clock now, and she still hasn’t got a call from Vivian. The pumpkins sit along the front porch railing, candles flickering. The birch branches and the ghostly scarecrow figure hanging from the noose cast long, eery shadows on the sidewalk as the last of daylight disappears. That organ music is playing again and the portable fan has been turned on. “I have to hand it to you, Pete,” Sally tells her brother—actually putting an arm around his shoulders. “This is the most amazing scene you ever built. The trick-or-treaters are going to go nuts.”

Because she has been feeling sick and crampy all day—the aftereffects of the miscarriage, combined with her terrible anxiety about her job—Claire didn’t have time to put a costume together. So she has dressed up in her Pioneer Woman outfit to pass out the candy. She adjusts her mop cap and checks her face in the mirror just as the first trick-or-treater arrives. A Power Ranger.

He scoops up a handful of candy corn and Hershey kisses. He’s followed by Pippi Longstocking, the Little Mermaid, and two more Power Rangers. Next comes a young couple with two very young children. The youngest one, a toddler, wears a home-sewn pumpkin suit whose pattern Claire noticed in
Redbook
this month. The older one, who looks to be around four years old, wears an even more elaborate home-sewn outfit. She’s a bunch of grapes.

Claire remembers the days when she sewed outfits like that. The year Pete was three she worked for a full week making him a dragon suit. Just before they went trick-or-treating, Pete burst into tears and said the fabric felt scratchy. At the last minute she dressed him in a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt and Sam’s old number from the Boston Marathon pinned to the front.

All the crazy, pointless efforts people make, Claire thinks. Trying to make life perfect for their children. Who are we kidding?

These days, of course, Pete would die before he’d let her go trick-or-treating with him and his friends. He and Jared are hoboes this year, in costumes they threw together themselves in ten minutes. Who knows where Sally is?

So many trick-or-treaters are stopping by, Claire doesn’t even try to close the door and sit down in between knocks. She just stands on the front porch with her bowlful of candy as they parade past. The little ones with parents hanging back proudly on the sidewalk, so eager to shield and protect. The older ones, whose parents have long since recognized the impossibility of keeping the ghosts at bay and checking every apple for razor blades.

A trio of figures approaches—two short, one tall. The larger figure stands in the shadows of Pete’s display while the two smaller ones mount the steps of Claire’s porch, their hands outstretched. One is dressed like a hooker, Claire thinks, although when she asks the girl who she’s supposed to be, the child says Barbie. She’s wearing a pink feather boa just like one Claire has up in her bedroom somewhere.

The other child is a witch. She wears a black wig and her face is covered with green makeup. Only when she says “Trick or treat” does Claire realize it’s Ursula. The figure in the shadows is Tim, of course. He hasn’t said anything.

“My goodness,” Claire says. “I didn’t even recognize you.”

“Heh, heh, heh, my little pretty,” says Ursula.

Tim approaches her now. “You look beautiful,” he whispers. She kisses his cheek.

“How do you feel?” he asks her. She called to tell him about the miscarriage. The one time they have spoken in days.

“I’m okay,” she says. “I’ll stop by later after the trick-or-treaters go home.”

“I love you,” he says softly. His tone as he tells her this no longer holds out hopefulness or joy.

“I know,” she says. Another band of trick-or-treaters is mounting the steps. The witch scoops a handful of candy corn into her bag and disappears down the street.

A
t nine-thirty Vivian finally calls her. “I have to be totally frank with you,” she says. “It was a tough meeting. That woman shared some pretty damaging allegations with us, and a number of members of the board took the position that we couldn’t risk the exposure, keeping you on. But enough of us went to bat for you that the board voted to keep you on in a probationary status. So long as no further allegations arise, naturally.”

Claire knows she should be grateful and penitent. But all she can do at the moment is say something about needing to hand out some more trick-or-treat candy.

Midnight now, her children finally in bed and the candles burned down, Claire heads to Tim’s apartment. She makes her way down the street littered with smashed pumpkins and trailing rolls of toilet paper, knowing this will be the last time.

He’s waiting for her in the living room of his sad, fishy-smelling apartment house. In the light of a single naked bulb, his face looks different to her than before. He has the face of a ruined man. A man she will leave, has left already. A man whose heart she will break.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells him. They are both past tears.

“How did I manage to screw things up so badly?” he says, “I only wanted to love you.”

Claire puts her arms around Tim and presses herself against his big, solid body. For the first time since she has known Tim, his cock is not hard for her. It’s as if Tim has withdrawn permission from his own body to want her anymore.